The search for water in space has led to a groundbreaking discovery as scientists have found a massive water reservoir surrounding a black hole located over 12 billion light-years away from Earth. This remarkable find has revealed that the reservoir contains an astonishing 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined.

Two teams of astronomers were instrumental in this discovery, marking it as the ‘largest and farthest’ water reservoir ever detected. According to scientist Matt Bradford, who led one of the teams, the water body feeds a quasar, a specific type of black hole. He emphasized the uniqueness of the environment around this quasar, stating that it is producing an immense mass of water. This finding further underscores the pervasiveness of water throughout the universe, even during its earliest stages.

The water cloud’s mass is estimated to be about 40 billion times that of Earth, with the study’s primary focus being a quasar known as APM 8279+5255. This quasar is an astounding 20 billion times larger than the Sun and possesses energy equivalent to a thousand trillion suns, providing the researchers with valuable insights into the spectral signatures of water.

Study co-author Eric Murphy highlighted that the black hole emits energy in the form of x-ray and infrared radiations as it consumes the disk of material, subsequently heating the surrounding material.